The Anatomy of Regime Change: Transnational Political Opposition and Domestic Foreign Policy Elites in the Making of US Foreign Policy on Iraq

Scholars attribute the causes of the 2003 US war in Iraq to threats to national security or declining hegemonic power. The dominant accounts, however, fail to clarify how Iraqi regime change emerged as official US foreign policy, despite policymakers’ hostility toward such an objective throughout the 1990s. I highlight how the exiled Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein mobilized neoconservative policymakers to advocate for regime change. My account links transnational foreign policy lobbying to the epistemic structure of the field of foreign policy, emphasizing overlapping elite networks, epistemic fluency, and cultural fit as key factors driving the adoption of Iraqi regime change. Using novel archival records and interviews with the architects of US foreign policy on Iraq, I challenge the conventional accounts of the worst foreign policy blunder since the Vietnam War and contribute to research on the micropolitics of “big” policy change, the historical sociology of foreign policy, and transnationalism and state power.